Danwei held its Third Plenary Session on Creative business in China earlier this week at the oft-mentioned Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business(长江商学院). Featuring Richard Robinson of mobile gaming company Kooky Panda, Dominic Johnson-Hill of hipster favourite Plastered T-shirts, and Kaiser Kuo of Ogilvy China, the packed session offered a spirited and informative look at how creativity and entrepreneurship go hand in hand, a particularly relevant topic for these tumultuous times.
Moderator Jeremy Goldkorn introduced two of the speakers–Richard Robinson was “so busy entrepreneuring that he was late”–and their backgrounds. All of the speakers had more than a decade of experience in China, arriving in China in the 80s or 90s and putting in a lot of time on the ground before becoming successful.
Johnson-Hill has been an entrepreneur for most of his time in China. One of his first companies here was a cigarette market research company introducing foreign companies to the Chinese market. After selling that company, he was able to live off the proceeds for several years before making his way to starting Plastered T-Shirts. Started in Beijing about two years ago, Plastered T-Shirts is now being carried in cities around the world.
Kuo was famously involved in Tang Dynasty (唐朝), one of China’s first heavy metal bands, and also worked as a tech journalist before ending up as an ideas guru at Ogilvy.
Richard Robinson had an interesting career trajectory, which you can see for yourself in his LinkedIn profile. In addition to working at tech startups, he has been a ski bum, grape picker, and assembly line worker. He also runs the
Some interesting points:
- Don’t quit your day job to write your Great Novel. Really, don’t do it.
- For writers, find a niche that no one else is covering. Kuo developed his portfolio by figuring out which beat journalists hated to cover. At that time, it was the telecom industry, so he went after that and became known as a tech journalist. He said that while Beijing has many writers masquerading as travel or arts beat writers, there were few writers covering business, which is what publications are particularly interested in paying for.
- Being a family man (or woman) can help with being a creative entrepreneur; as Robinson put it, by becoming a father, he was forced to delegate and prioritize so that he could leave work and spend time with his family.
- China’s advantage for entrepreneurs is what corporations have figured out already: overhead is low. Plastered, for instance, was started with just 40,000 RMB. Johnson-Hill admitted that during the first month he was only able to sell 12 shirts, with the overhead costs being so low at the time he was able to keep it going until it became successful.
- Guanxi (relationships, 关系) is a point belaboured by many foreign businesses trying to break into China, but as Kuo put it, the idea that guanxi is particular to China is pretty silly, as there is not a single country in the world where your social capital isn’t worth something. Nonetheless, for Johnson-Hill, the ability to drink a lot of baijiu and hand out cigarettes went a long, long way. Get started by talking to everyone you know; you’ll soon find suppliers and connections who can help you out.
- One question that came up was whether or not their success was due to being in China just as it was beginning to take off in the mid-nineties. Yes, timing is everything, but China’s creative industries are still only beginning to hit the curve, so there are plenty of opportunities out there to develop and create your own market.
- At the risk of sounding like one of those motivational business books, don’t be afraid to fail. All three had failures that they learned from before they became successful.
The take-away here is that China is a great place to be a creative entrepreneur with an idea and a bit of seed money, and of course, a lot of hard work.
